Friday, September 26, 2008

Cynthia McKinney, Slayer of the Fed Dragon

G.E: "Even though what McKinney proposes is even worse than the Fed, at least she’s challenging the Fed, which is a sacred cow."

Cynthia McKinney, freedom fighter.

Mises is quoted as defining socialism as “a completely integrated system which regulates all prices, wages, and interest rates, and which thus places full control of production and consumption in the hands of the authorities”. So I guess as long as my daughter is allowed to run her unregulated lemonade stand, we’re not yet at socialism.

Sorry, Ludwig, wrong answer. Firms, industries, and economies can each be socialized to various degrees. Mises apparently applied the term “interventionism” to situations which fell short of his definition of socialism.

We pay tens of thousands of dollars of property taxes that mostly go to our school district, and that pays for “free” admission at our choice of exactly two government elementary schools (because of a transition phase as the nearer school starts up). That’s not intervention, that’s socialized elementary education.